pathological science

"Pathological science" is a term coined by Nobel-laureate in chemistry
Irving Langmuir in a presentation
he made at General Electric's Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory a few years before his
death in 1957.
Langmuir described typical cases as involving such things as barely
detectable causal agents observed near the threshold of sensation which are
nevertheless asserted to have been detected with great accuracy. The
supporters offer fantastic theories that are contrary to experience and meet
criticisms with ad hoc excuses. And, most telling, only supporters can
reproduce the results. Critics can't duplicate the experiments.

These are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked
into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves
in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold
interactions. These are examples of pathological science. These are things that attracted
a great deal of attention. Usually hundreds of papers have been published on them.
Sometimes they have lasted for 15 or 20 years and then gradually have died
away.

Langumuir visited J.B. Rhine's lab at Duke University where Rhine
was claiming results of ESP experiments that could not be
predicted by chance and were probably due to some sort of psychic power.
Langmuir found that Rhine was not counting all his data, however. He was
leaving out the scores of those he believed were guessing their
Zener cards wrong on purpose. "Rhine believed that persons who
disliked him guessed wrong to spite him. Therefore, he felt it would be
misleading to include their scores" (Park 2000, 42). Rhine determined
that some of his subjects were deliberately guessing wrong because their
scores were too low to have occurred by chance. "Indeed, he was
convinced that abnormally low scores were as significant as abnormally
high scores in proving the existence of ESP" (ibid.).

[new] Langmuir also deemed pathological science the work of Russian embryologist Alexander Gurwitsch who claimed that biophotons (very weak photon emissions in the ultraviolet range from living tissue), which Gurwitch called "mitogenetic rays," stimulated cell division. There had been claims during the Stalin regime that biophotons were used to diagnose cancer. There has never been a replication of these findings, if indeed they were findings.[/new]

In the 1920s, thereported "ultraweak" photon emissions from living tissues in the UV-range of the spectrum. He named them because his experiments convinced him that they had a stimulating effect on cell division. Biophotons were claimed to have been employed by the Stalin regime to diagnose cancer. The method has not been tested in the West. However, failure to replicate his findings and the fact that, though cell growth can be stimulated and directed by radiation this is possible only at much higher amplitudes, evoked a general skepticism about Gurwitsch's work. In 1953 Irving Langmuir dubbed Gurwitsch's ideas pathological science. Commercial products, therapeutic claims and services supposedly based on his work appear at present to be best regarded as such.

A. Cromer, commenting on Langmuir's characteristics of pathological science,
noted that scientists are often not very good judges of the scientific process.
Even the best intentions can be subverted by self-deception. Good science is
not simply a matter of honesty or wisdom. Furthermore,

Real discoveries of phenomena contrary to all previous scientific experience are very
rare, while fraud, fakery, foolishness, and error resulting from overenthusiasm and
delusion are all too common (Cromer 1993).

Do Langmuir's observations imply that scientists should shy away from controversial
topics such as prions, facilitated communication,
cold fusion, orgone energy, ESP, and zero-point energy? No. What follows is that any scientist
doing any research must proceed with caution, tentativeness, a sense of the history
of science and an awareness of the tendencies in human nature which can easily lead the
wisest of men or women astray. What also seems to follow is that to show little or no
interest in allowing oneself and others to try to prove one's fantastic theories to be
wrong, while immediately meeting every objection with ad hoc
hypotheses, is a sign of pathological science if not pseudoscience.